The Blank Tape

Robert A. Waters

I keep it beside my computer, an ordinary blank tape. Once in a while, I put it in my
cassette player and listen to the silence. Dozens of other tapes lie on my desk. They're
all labeled with names and dates. When I turn them on, I hear strangers telling me how
they used guns to survive an armed robbery or an assault. The voices are from the
mid-west, Deep South, New England. They're blue collar and white collar, young and old,
male and female. Middle America.

The wisdom in those voices are in direct contrast to the silence on the blank tape.
That tape represents the lost voices of unarmed victims. As a writer of books and articles
about people who used guns to defend their lives, I've interviewed many who by all rights
should be dead. While the debate rages over what this nation should do about gun violence,
these folks hang in limbo. By any standard of measurement, they should be declared
national heroes.

But that would turn the debate around.

So they're ignored.

I pick up a tape at random and insert it into the machine. Mary Lou Krause of Swanton,
Ohio is speaking. When two armed robbers targeted their home, she and her husband Jerry
were ready. While Jerry fought the attackers, Mary Lou used her .22-caliber revolver to
shoot one of them. When she relives the confrontation, I sense the fear in her voice, the
catch in her throat. But when she tells of the plan she and her husband had formulated for
just such an event, her voice rings with excitement. "When people knock on the
door," she says, "I look out our picture window. If I know them, I
let them in.
If I don't know them, I get my gun and stand behind the door so They can't see me and I
let my husband talk to them. I'm ready if needed." Simple, but effective.

I turn on another tape. It's Ann Barry, a history professor from Kentucky. She speaks
of the terror she felt after two men used a pick-ax to batter down her door. "My mind
was frozen," she says. "I couldn't breathe. All I could do was take short, quick
gasps, like a dog panting in summer." Barry met the invaders with a .357 Magnum.
After a wild shootout in her bedroom, the assailants fled, one with a bullet in his
abdomen. On the tape, Barry expresses her outrage at those who would deny her The right to
defend herself. "One suggestion," she says, "has been to require
combination safety locks on [guns]. The gun is in the dark, unloaded, and you're trying to
work a combination lock, load the gun, and be ready to protect yourself from a home
invasion, all in a matter of seconds. Forget it—you're dead, murdered by criminals who
follow no legal restrictions."

The voices on the tapes come through loud and clear: anger at an assailant who put them
in the position of having to shoot; fear for their own lives and the lives of family
members; and finally, relief at having survived. To a man (and woman), they express
outrage at a government that would take away their only hope of survival in case another
attack occurs.

I pick up the last tape. It's almost too painful to hear. I guide it into the machine
and listen as the story runs to its brutal conclusion. Near the end, Sammie Foust urges me
to "write about the aftermath." But who wants to read about the lone survivor of
a train wreck? And that's what she looked like when James Wayne Horne finished with her.
Fortunately, when she finished with him, he looked dead. The three-time loser broke into
her Cape Coral, Florida home one spring morning and tortured her and cut her and used her
face as a punching bag. Had she not had a gun, Foust would be another murder statistic in
some dry FBI report. Even though she's thankful to have survived, her life has been hell
since.

The aftermath? Who wants to read about a former beauty contestant whose face is scarred
from knife cuts? Who wants to read about someone who can only eat soft food because her
gums and teeth were nearly obliterated in the assault? Who wants to read about someone
slowly going blind in the eye that was knocked out of its socket during the onslaught? And
who wants to read about the years of financial hardship, of counseling, of flashbacks, of
night-sweats?

It's too painful, Sammie. I can't write it.

I replace hers with the blank tape. For an hour, it spins in silence. Then, in the
background, I hear faint whispers. A woman's voice grows louder. And suddenly the tape
blasts me with screams and shrieks and moans. Then I hear a woman's whispered prayer and
silence once again. There are no gunshots, no male voice screaming in pain. And I realize
that the blank tape has finally spoken to me.

Of the aftermath.

It's reliving Sammie Foust's last moments had she not had a gun.

Robert A. Waters, author of
The Best
Defense and
Guns
Save Lives, has a B. S. degree in Political Science and a M. Ed. in
Rehabilitation Counseling. He worked for 25 years with the developmentally
disabled before retiring in 1996. Waters' interest in writing and
conservative causes blended in the research and writing of The Best
Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a
Firearm. He found thousands of documented cases in which victims
successfully defended themselves with firearms – many of the attackers were
hardened, career criminals. "If a fraction of these cases were publicized by
the national media," Waters said, "gun control would become a dead issue."